This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]
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15 October
This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]
I had not seen Poor Kids on t.v. Around 100 of us watched, felt, feared. Sad that the Q&A host at @CamPicturehouse didn't ask a filmic Q...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 15, 2013
Not every statistic in this film – there are numerous quoted, many of them quite shocking – is stencilled onto a wall for us to read (the writing is literally on the wall), but those that are actually appeared to be, to judge from a long, angled shot, which leaves two children playing beneath it :
How take in that one in six children in poor families have thought of suicide, for example, or the effects on asthma and other conditions, or on mortality, of living in poor housing ?
We took it in more easily through the eyes, and prematurely wise words*, of Paige, living in a horribly damp apartment that, rightly, we see demolished, condemning the high-rise solution, and, as Paige tells us, the dust carried as far as Argos. We see how she has trimmed the blind, affected by mould, and hear from her how humiliating it is, even though she keeps clothes away from the window, to be told that she smells of it. She is a sensitive girl, adapted to these hard ways of living, and we can see her joy when her mother is given a property half-an-hour away, out of the Gorbals. Seeing her playing in the snow in their garden gives us hope.
The most shocking thing is how these children have to take on financial constraints. One subject, who had eczema on her legs (until repeated applications of cream cured her), chillingly told us, in a throw-away remark, how she had picked her legs until they bled as a way of feeling a sense of release. Self-harm is little understood in society, least of all that there are various, very different reasons, why people harm themselves, not all related to harming in itself – some, who feel numb, do it to feel something, whereas someone else might, through feeling in control (even only of what he or she is doing to her body), balance the sense that everything else is beyond their power.
Sam’s sister Kaylie (?) also told us, I think, that she had attempted suicide, and had suicidal thoughts. Although Sam was the subject in her family (in Leicester), we could see through Sam and her (Sam had to wear his sister’s blouse as a shirt (and her blazer) for school, and that was hardly going to go unnoticed) how they sought to support and understand the pressures on their out-of-work father, including the fact that Child Benefit for her had wrongly been stopped, and he was having to survive until the mistake got remedied. We saw him produce meals for them to eat that looked very nice, but which he said that cost almost for ingredients.
Empty fridges, children going without lunch, or having to be put onto free school meals, and meters for electricity or even t.v. – these things were the stuff of the lives that these children (and their parents) had allowed us to look into. And, as film-maker Jezza Neumann was at pains to point out in the Q&A, this film, had been made for t.v. two years ago, and yet people were still watching it – not a world that suddenly came into existence with The Coalition, but carrying over from the Brown years, and those of Blair before.
We were told that, not surprisingly after the screening, Sam had some two hundred donations of school uniform (and a vicar donated to set up a second-hand uniform facility), Page (I think that it was Page) an offer of riding lessons (she had wanted to try), and numerous other kindnesses from people whom the film had touched. Neumann’s take was that, when areas become those where the poor live, and no one is in any better position than anyone else to help a neighbour, that kindness cannot operate so easily as it might have done, when someone lost a job, and those near them could tide them over.
The film is extremely well made, and Neumann told us how those who had seen it in the States, prior to making the US version, had been through it almost frame by frame, before reporting that they had been unable to see how he had prompted these words from the featured children - he said that the only way to make such a film is to be honest, and that he had known, with Page’s mother, that people would query her apparently manicured nails, whereas she had cut them from Coke cans and superglued them on.
The snobbery between cinema and t.v. films apart, this film conveys its message effectively, economically, and with an emotional force.
We are still where we were, and worse, with Poor Kids (2011)...https://t.co/atiycAeQtahttps://t.co/8IomNOagED
— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2019
End-notes
* We hear children, in this film, troubled with adult concerns, such as debt, how their presents can be afforded
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
